Sample Memoir

Lessons from a Poet in Residence

          His office was on the top floor of the huge old brown Victorian mansion that housed all the English professors’ offices.  I raced up the rickety outside stairway but paused a moment at the top to steady my anxious breathing.  Taking a deep breath, I knocked a timid little knock:  tap, tap, tap? 

          “Enter!” he commanded.  Of course his office would be a sloping-ceilinged garret, crammed with books and papers and no place for anyone but him to sit.  Of course he would be lounging at his desk, rumpled shirttails hanging out, sandaled feet propped carelessly on a stack of student papers.  Of course his retreat would be dim and musty smelling:  He was the POET IN RESIDENCE.

          And I was seventeen and enrolled in his creative writing class.  My first creative writing class.  I was thoroughly in awe and hopelessly infatuated.

          I had sat in the front row of his class for weeks as his baritone caressed the words of so many poems, making many abstruse poems throb with life that had, in previous courses, been only deadening exercises in scanning and symbol hunting.  My adolescent heart had constricted when, as he read, tears gathered in his sad brown eyes.  And when the strength of his passion for a poem or a poet or an idea animated his lecture, I felt as if I were being carried away on some high tide of intellectual communion that made his class a spiritual experience.

          But now I shifted nervously from one foot to the other.  Should I sit?  (Where?  The only other chair was piled high with papers.)  Should I remind him of my name?  Was he ever going to look up from what he was reading?  I was looking forward, with just a bit of trepidation, to our first conference about my very first short story.  I’d never “conferenced” with a teacher (let alone a POET IN RESIDENCE), and I had the giddy hope that this talented soul with the long, wavy dark hair would find me worthy.  Perhaps worthy enough to talk to about something besides this short story I had so painfully drafted, re-drafted, and finally, reluctantly, submitted.  Worthy of talking with my POET IN RESIDENCE about great literature, philosophy, LIFE.

          Abruptly he looked up from the paper in his hand—my paper I realized with a start, my story covered with angry stabs of red ink.  He tossed my story across the desk at me.

          “Well,” he said, “what do you have to say in defense of this trash?”

          Trash?  The nuns had had such high praise for my large vocabulary, careful sentences, and perfect punctuation.

          My hands shook badly as I reached to gather up the pages of my story.  Red.  So much red ink covered the pages!  No teacher had ever criticized my work so harshly.  And no one had ever spoken to me with such contempt.  Where was the gentle poet who had led me to so many classroom epiphanies?

          “You know, this really wouldn’t even make the cut at Redbook.”  His big, hard voice said more, but I couldn’t hear it.

          I couldn’t say anything either.  I knew that if I tried, my voice would break, and then I’d start to sob right in front of him, and any last shed of dignity I had would be gone forever.

          I turned to flee.  I banged against the chair, knocking everything piled on it to the floor.  Sliding on the handouts and student papers, I headed toward the door.  Out!  I had to get out of there!  Careening off the doorframe in my frantic flight, I emerged onto the landing outside his office.  Afraid he might call me back to finish his diatribe about my pathetic writing, I took the stairs two and three at a time.  By now hot tears of humiliation were scalding my cheeks and a nine-hundred-pound block of stone inscribed “PATHETIC FAILURE” had been rolled into place atop my heart.  All I wanted to do was make it back to my dorm room, lock myself away, and cry for about a year.

          Hours later, I found a red B- hastily scrawled on the last page of that agonizingly produced little story, the one that would have been rejected by Redbook.  The next class with THE POET I moved to the back of the classroom behind a linebacker whose coach had assured him this creative writing stuff would be a breeze.  That linebacker did indeed breeze through and get his D.  Sad and hurt, but now silent and certain I had chosen the wrong major, I suffered through another 10 weeks of THE POET IN RESIDENCE, received my B, and contemplated a career in theology, forestry, or computers.